Collaborative Research on Lobbying

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This collaborative research project involves hundreds of interviews with Washington policy advocates in order to investigate how groups compete for political influence through the arguments, evidence, and issue definitions they offer to shape the policymaking process. An initial sample of approximately 100 lobbyists is selected based on the frequency of their involvement in government lobbying. Each of these individuals is interviewed in-person and asked to describe their advocacy efforts on the most recent policy matter of interest to their groups. Additional interviews with an average of five leading policy makers per issue will then be conducted. The purpose of these interviews is to learn about the strategies and arguments used by the different coalitions on each of the 100 issues. Additional data about each issue is collected from secondary sources. Since some of the issues to be chosen are likely to be small and relatively unknown to the public, interviews may be the only way to learn about the policy development process. Other issues in the sample are likely to involve extensive public debate, large-scale media attention, and a wealth of publicly available information. The result will be approximately 100 carefully collected issue-modules representing a sample of issues attracting the attention of lobbyists. The goal is to collect as much information as possible about the public and private efforts at issue-definition, arm-twisting, public relations, and scientific arguing occurring in a random sample of policy debates. In this way, the project is distinct from prior work in that the investigators have avoided focusing only on PAC contributions, media campaigns, or any other single tactic of lobbying.A team of scholars working with graduate students conducts the multi-year data collection. The resulting databases not only fuel their research but by making each of the case studies as well as a summary set of statistical indicators available over the Web, they generate more interest in the study of lobbying behavior. The comparable and detailed case studies allow scholars to make their own comparisons of various group lobbying activities, hopefully providing the empirical back-bone on which much further research can be based.